Show Me Shapes

Help your child recognize shapes in household objects and understand how a “whole” can be changed into two equal parts to make “halves.”

What You Need:

2 sheets of paper

Crayons or pencils

What You and Your Child Will Do:

Walk around the house with your child and ask him or her to identify various objects that seem to have geometric shapes. Your child should be able to recognize some plane shapescircles, squares, triangles, and rectanglesand some solid shapesspheres, cones, cubes, rectangular prisms, and cylinders. (A picture frame may be said to look like a rectangle or a square. A ball or an orange may be called a sphere.)

Let your child make drawings of any two of the objects, one to a sheet of paper. One drawing should be of something that looks like a plane shape; the other, of something that looks like a solid. Tell the child to make the drawings very large in order to fill as much of the paper as possible.

When the work is done, have the child tell you about the completed drawings. Acknowledge that each picture shows a whole object, for example, a “whole picture frame” or a “whole ball.”

Now ask your child to fold one of the pictures to show “two equal parts,” or halves. After the folding is done say, “Show me the halves.” (Your child should point to each half.) Confirm that two halves of exactly the same size and shape make up a whole. Note that your child's success in folding to show halves is less important than developing the sense of creating two equal parts, or halves, from a single whole.

Repeat the process by asking the child to fold the other picture to show halves.